Western Short StoryGuilty Billy Never Hung Tom Sheehan

Western Short Story

When they talk
about Billy Gatling they say he came crooked and left crooked, bent
over the saddle of a posse pack horse, dead as dead can be. But he
was never hung by his neck, and that’s what he swore the day in
court when he was condemned to hang; “Ain’t nobody in this room
ever going to hang me by the neck.” He said it the way a man would
say it knowing he already had a way out of his situation.

Of course, history
and fate, like always, constantly join forces when upstarts,
criminals, and the condemned move into prominence in a region. The
"study of any place” reveals its inhabitants without leaving
anybody out of the picture, the good, the bad and the indifferent.

And so it was in
this little town.

Camp MacGregor,
once an army post in Colorado, became the Town of Camp MacGregor when
the army moved out and the people living outside the old camp simply
took the sign down from the command headquarters and mounted it on
the general store so it read “Camp MacGregor Gen’l Store,”
which was all the room they had for the name and still keep it proper
and grammatical.

The inhabitants of
Camp MacGregor were a mixed lot as much as the entire west was. Here,
in Billy Gatling’s hometown, the people were first settlers
families, discharged veterans of the army, “turned-out” Indian
scouts no longer needed by the army, deserters who had fled both the
Blue and the Gray armies in the Great War, miners and mountain men
who grew too old to manage and subsist in the hill country, women who
were passing through to other places by demand and who slipped into
open hiding in the town, entrepreneurs who fell drunk off their
drummer’s wagons, freighters who lost their wares and wagons and
walked into town to re-settle their intentions, and saddle tramps run
out of “other places” who had come to the end of a long trail and
saw opportunity to rest their weary bones.

So Billy Gatling
and Camp MacGregor merged and were rarely separated in talks of
either one, for all their beginnings were as varied as the landscape
about them.

Seven men and one
woman stood up in court in front of Judge Ezra Cummings and swore
they saw Billy Gatling draw down on Everett Sommers, who had no
weapon on his person, and shoot him several times. The count of shots
heard ranged from two to six, the difference which the judge
discounted as being brought back to mind by people stunned by
disbelief, which he believed. Sommers was “a rat of the first
order,” they all agreed, but “out here in the territory” a man
has the right to protect himself and Sommers had none at hand.

“Guilty,” the
foreman of the jury said after three minutes of discussion, to which
the judge said, “Guilty, Billy, and you’ll hang by your neck for
this crime,” to which Billy answered with his sworn oath.

None of them
realized that Billy, in one of his rare working efforts had labored
for a week on the construction of the jail and sheriff’s office and
with foresight and good sense, considering what he had already
committed in the nature of crimes, managed to build an escape under
the jail, which one day he might have use of. He simply did not
drive all the nails in one section the way he had driven under the
sheriff’s office. And not enough nails to begin with. As a further
assurance of escape, he inserted a piece of treated iron in the lower
portion of the wooden floor.

More than once,
thereafter, while drinking in the Broken Horse Saloon, he imagined
himself locked up in that jail and enjoyed the look that would cross
the sheriff’s face on a morning of revelation … the cell empty
and Billy Sure-To-Hang long gone out of there.

Billy Gatling, on
his way back to the cell after the trial, began to set up his escape.
He said to Sheriff Jack Witherspoon on the way back to the jail, “You
know, Sheriff, that my gang will be coming to set me free before you
know it.”

“What gang is
that, Billy?” the sheriff said, never having seen any gang at all
that had proclaimed Billy Gatling as a member. “Where are they,
Billy, this gang of yours? I’ve never seen them, never once. Not
here in town. Not at the trial. Not at the Broken Horse. No place.”

He moved Billy
Gatling behind bars and didn’t wait for an answer as he locked the
cell door, with his prisoner swinging around and replying, “You
better keep your eyes open, Sheriff. They’ll be here before the
gallows is built.”

Gatling crawled
onto the single bunk, placed his clasped hands behind his head, and
added, cranking his voice higher as the sheriff was departing, “You
ask some of them fellas at the Broken Horse where my gang is and one
a them might tell you, Sheriff. He surely might tell you if you was
to give him an extra drink or two.”

Witherspoon turned
around and said, “You don’t fool me none with that kind of stuff,
Billy, trying to get me to buy a few drinks for your pals. Take it
from me, they’ll all forget you as soon as you’re gone. That’s
the way it goes out here.” He closed the door on the way out as he
said, “I’m just going to check on how the gallows is going.
Should be done by late evening.”

In The Broken Horse
Saloon that evening, after he had checked on the completion of the
gallows, he had an audience of younger men at the bar,

“Can you imagine
Billy trying to get me to buy some of you gents, or one tattler in
the group, a few extra drinks to tell me where his gang is located.”
He laughed loud and long and ordered another drink from the bartender
also laughing his way through the conversation.

One of the men at
the bar said, “Whose gang, Sheriff? Billy’s gang? He ain’t got
no close pal, never mind no gang. But I’ll take one of them drinks
and tell you just where his gang is hidden.” He spun about and said
to the others, “How’s that sound, boys, the sheriff buyin’ me a
drink, or two, to get me to tell where Billy’s gang is hidden, now
loadin’ up their rifles, getting’ their horses all set, gettin’
the pack of dynamite they swiped off the minin’ company up in the
hills just yesterday or last week when Billy was first put in jail.”

His following
laughter set off the entire saloon, all of Camp MacGregor it seemed
laughing at Billy Gatling’s last known pronouncement about his not
getting hung any time soon by anybody in Camp MacGregor.

The sun passed on
in its continual voyage, evening swept day under its feet, shadows
slipped across all of Camp MacGregor, supper hour was forgotten
except by an owl as it hooted from a lookout tree behind the livery,
looking for its next meal, and Sheriff Witherspoon and a lively group
of townsmen set up the history of Billy Gatling, unleashing all the
stories carried like baggage until this point, the near hanging of a
fellow townsman.

The stories came
like a flash fire on the grass.

“You never knew
this one, Sheriff, I’ll bet, the time Billy, when he was a kid,
asked Jimmy Carson to hold up the turtle he caught down at the river
so he could see how big it was, and when Jimmy held it over his head,
Billy shot that turtle square in his round back, killing him on the
spot and scaring Jimmy so he never come near Billy again. Never knew
that, did you, Sheriff? What he was like as a kid, that Billy.”

Witherspoon,
shaking his head, said, “Hell, I never heard that one. Why didn’t
someone tell me that one? Not that he’d get hung for it, but it’d
help build a character case for sure.”

“That one’s
nothin’, Sheriff,” added another drinker. “One time, out on a
drive with Clete Wellum, one of the few times Billy worked at all, he
put a dead mouse right beside the cook’s load of bread on the
tailgate of the chow wagon, and nobody’d eat it and the cook never
knew and Billy ate the whole damned loaf all hisself. Laughed half
the day over that. What he was like.”

“Cook should have
known that one. I’d ‘ve snuck a dead snake in Billy’s bedroll
for that, believe me. I could answer stuff like that. Working a drive
is hard enough without someone playing tricks and no one getting even
for it. Wouldn’t let that one go by if I was on that drive. No,
sir.”

Another
biographical volunteer offered his piece to the discussion. “They
say Billy shot that girl you found down by the river. ‘Member that
girl with her dress all ripped and her basket of flowers found in the
brush like they was tossed there.”

“Who says that?”
the sheriff said. “I never heard that side of things. Never once.”

“Oh, you never
looked at Billy that way, Sheriff. He was a wild one even as a kid.
You know what I heard once, way back when? He shot that colt of
Wellum’s out of spite. Just shot him from the edge of the woods out
back of the pasture because Wellum let his cows walk on his mother’s
garden and didn’t pay her what she lost. So he up and shot that
colt Wellum was up all one night waiting for it to come.”

“I never heard
that one either,” the sheriff said. “You folks sure kept me in
the dark about Billy. Too bad none of this came up before, we might
have got in the way of him shooting Everett Sommers. Now his kids’ll
never get to know their daddy.”

Sheriff
Witherspoon, uncountable times that evening, shook his head in
disbelief, as if full truth was never to be known about his prisoner.

The night went on
and the stories and tales about the life of Billy Gatling went on,
all the supposed dark parts of him getting exposed in one revealing
session that matched the night in its darkness, and the projected
future of a man to be hung come a daylight soon enough around the
corner.

As the stories
carried on, drawing more men of the saloon into the midst of the
revelations hidden in one man’s life, that man went to work in his
jail cell, the deputy in the office playing cards by himself, dozing
off now and then, once bringing a cup of coffee to the lone prisoner
sitting on his bunk, face in his hands, contemplating, the deputy was
sure, the hanging coming too soon for any thinking man.

But, with a moon
sleeping behind a mountain and then sleeping behind a few clouds, and
silence most beneficent, Gatling’s fingers searched out for the
piece of iron he had slipped between the boards where bars met the
floor in a heavy beam. He worked silently in his search, sure the
piece was in one corner and not the other, and found it, the slight
tip of it exposed on his fingertips. Slowly, again as silently as
possible, he worked that tip upward in its bind until it was grasped
in his closed fingers and worked until it was free.

He did not even
utter a sotto voice “Hah,” when he held the long metal piece
aloft in the darkness of the cell, in the darkness of the night.
There was a simple nod of self-commendation as he heard his own voice
say, in the echoing courtroom, “Ain’t nobody in this room ever
going to hang me by the neck.”

Soon enough,
without any additional words said or heard, Gatling was at the
special boards making up part of the jail floor. He worked diligently
at nails that had been driven several times into the floor boards and
withdrawn each time, assuring the grip of the wood was weak, loose,
and easily retrieved again. He stuck each nail in his pants pocket,
smothering the sound, keeping them from making noise as he worked.
All the specially handled nails came loose in this manner, from the
three floor boards so treated, and with one look around the cell, at
the darkness it held for some men, the final darkness, he slipped
down through the hole in the floor. Into the emptied nail holes on
the top side of each board, he rubbed a fingertip’s worth of dirt,
filling up the holes. Then he drew the loose boards back into their
places.

Under each of the
three boards on the bottom sides he placed the retrieved nails
through other nails driven into the board and hammered on the bottom
into a circular fashion, nails he had bent during the construction.

This act locked the
boards back into place and would give him additional time to get
further away from the hangman’s noose.

The condemned man
stole a horse and saddle from the livery, rode it to a hollow tree in
the near foothills, retrieved a “just-in-case” gun and holster
and a canteen, and rode away into the deep night, saying, now as loud
as he wanted, sometimes near singing it like a refrain from a song,
sometimes like an orator at the close of his delivery for all the
world to hear, “Ain’t nobody in this room ever going to hang me
by the neck.”

In the morning, on
his first check of the jail, the deputy still asleep in his own cot,
Sheriff Witherspoon also heard Billy Gatling, from the courtroom, and
from wherever he was now, saying again and again the same set of
words, “Ain’t nobody in this room ever going to hang me by the
neck.”